4000 Islands

Situated down the very bottom of Laos, near the Cambodian border, are a group of small Mekong islands known as the '4000 islands' and they weould have to be one of the quietest locations I have visited. Well, Don Khong anyway, Don Det is actually quite busy with tourists. Traveling with Ciaran, my mate from home, and a nice English girl we had met in Vientiene, we stayed on don Khong for our first day and night. Walking through the streets to explore the islands little kids on bikes would ride past us and shout out 'pen' at us. We though it must be Lao for something but when we asked at the hotel the owner told us that they kids were literally shouting pen, as in a pen for writing, as not many kids had one to do their school work with. Hearing this my mate from home and I bought all the pens the island shop had and hired some push bikes to ride around distributing them. It was a good experience to see the children's faces light up when we gave them the pens but also very depressing to know we could only do so little and that these children wanted to learn so much but didn't even have a pen to do it with!
The next day we headed to don Khong, where our accomodation was just $2.50 a night! This island is definitely the more popular amongst tourists with quite a few around but it was still nice to hire push bikes again and ride around the island to see the waterfall, and local kids riding a water buffalo. Poverty in this part of Laos is everywhere. We stayed on Don Det for two nights, relaxing in our hammocks and visiting the largest waterfall, per volume of water, in South East Asia. We also had a heavy night of drinking here that involved nursing a blow up dolphin. Ready for something more, we headed south to Cambodia, to visit Angkor.